Narrative Inquiry - Volume 32, Issue 1, 2022

This study examines how patients use narratives to evaluate their experiences of healthcare services online. The analysis draws on corpus linguistic techniques, specifically annotation, applying Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) framework to a sample of online comments about the NHS in England. Narratives are pervasive in this context, being present more than absent in the patients’ comments, but are particularly prominent in comments which evaluate care negatively. Evaluations can be accomplished through all the structural elements of the narrative, including in combination with one another. However, the presence and ordering of these elements does not seem to be influenced by the type of evaluation given (i.e. positive, negative or more neutral). As mediated social practice, the narratives are shaped by the technological affordances and social dynamics of this context, for instance in the placement of particular structural elements and the design of narratives for particular “imagined” audiences.

Previous research exploring the use of narratives in medical interviews has primarily examined the history-taking phase to illustrate the ways in which physicians and patients discursively collaborate to organize and interpret patients’ illness experiences (Eggly, 2002; Halkowski, 2006; Stivers & Heritage, 2001). In this paper, the scope will be expanded to demonstrate that narrative accounts are interwoven and unfold across various phases of the medical interview, not only the history-taking phase, and are utilized in a variety of ways to collaboratively accomplish specific social practices. A narrative as talk-in-interaction approach is used to examine narrative accounts using audio-recordings of naturally occurring medical interview data (US, American English). This paper examines the ways in which narratives are locally occasioned to do a variety of things (e.g., raise difficult topics, actively resist treatment, reinforce identities), including influencing the treatment decision making process.

This paper engages with the relationship between story ownership – so who owns a story, tellership – so who has the right to tell it, and functions of workplace narratives as well as the broader social practices at work. Drawing upon discourse and narrative analyses, the paper investigates specifically how the negotiation of meaning visible in the often incomplete and fragmented but naturally-occurring narratives points to the discursive struggle over the construction of self within the specific parameters of the notion of professionalism. The paper identifies the facets of story ownership and discusses how each one can be affected by such regulatory forces of the social practices of work.

The study investigates story-telling in naturally-occurring interactions in a care home for older people with dementia in England. Stories were told by a range of discourse participants and varied from more relationally-oriented anecdotes occurring as part of small talk to more transactionally-oriented narratives embedded into work routines. The main aim of the study was to explore narratives as social practice in the interactions of the care staff and to discover what functions they perform in their workplace practice and more generally in that of the care home. The analysis focused principally on two primarily work-oriented narrative types: “working stories” and “narratives of professional practice”. The findings were that such stories performed a range of key functions in the professional practice of the care givers, in particular problem-solving, knowledge-sharing and critical evaluation.

In evidence-based practices, narratives are the vehicle through which medical knowledge is shared and clinical judgment is grounded. This paper explores narratives as a sanctioned social practice that help a group of clinicians in a healthcare institution in New Zealand build and negotiate expertise and accountability, as they discuss clinical cases. To this end, the paper investigates narratives in six staff meetings, which were video and audio recorded. The paper presents a discursive analysis of the functions of narratives in this context to show how narratives are interactional achievements that are pivotal to clinical decision-making and to building and contesting professional stances. Finally, the paper reflects on the value of narratives as shared resources that are sometimes revisited and reframed over time and that help construct a common thread of history that becomes part of the cultural capital of the organization and positions clinicians as core members of their community.

This paper explores the role of narratives as resources for enacting group membership and community building in the case of one company, a Greek-Turkish partnership, SforSteel. We pay special attention to the function of iterative stories and specifically one that indexes the origin of the partnership. The analysis shows that the story, and its episodes, act as significant interactional resources for partners to claim a shared regional identity, that of people coming from the area of Trabzon in the Black Sea region. By negotiating a common origin, the partners simultaneously strengthen their long-term relationship and continuously reconnect the past to the present. The strong long-term relationship has a symbolic status and constitutes a condition for being accepted in this community. Through the analysis of this story our discussion addresses the importance of iterativity and the foundational relationship between community and trust.

In contemporary working life, art-based initiatives are increasingly used in organizational training and development. For artists, this has created new employment opportunities as creative entrepreneurs who provide specialist services for workplaces. In this article, we study the dynamics of such encounters through the narrated accounts of training professionals. Our data come from a professional mentoring program where the working pairs of artists and consultants shared stories about their customer projects. By using conversation analysis as a method, we analyze the way stories are interactionally accomplished in peer group sessions of the program. In particular, we analyze how participants produce different versions of the narrated events, and by so doing, negotiate the questions of blame and accountability with regard to professional action. In conclusion, we discuss stories and storytelling as organizational practice through which the moral order and legitimacy of the program is sustained and the boundaries of the profession constructed.

Drawing on a corpus of 100 authentic telephone-mediated interactions from a British credit union, this paper is the first to examine narrative practices in debt collection encounters. It demonstrates that the credit union’s debt collector routinely invites and supports indebted individuals’ narratives using alignment and affiliation. Through a small stories approach, the paper therefore highlights that an organisation’s core values and principles can be seen “in action” in the ways that a professional orients to lay-people’s stories in professional-lay discourse. In this case, the collector’s narrative practices are emblematic of the credit union’s consciously ethical, responsible, and debtor-centric approach to collecting debt. The analysis also shows that indebted individuals perform important interactive work through their narrative accounts in terms of mitigating responsibility for their debt, constructing blameless and acceptable identities, and implicitly encouraging (or explicitly instructing) the collector to affiliate with their stance.

We present a case study of a small talk sequence in a Belgian workplace between two female colleagues with a migration background, in which they share stories with each other on racial micro-aggressions they personally experienced. We draw on the social practice approach and focus on the narrators’ identity work in this interaction. We found that the narrators construct stories in which powerless and outgroup identities are projected upon them in the storyworld, but by means of which more empowered identities and an ingroup with the interlocutor are talked into being in the storytelling world. Interestingly, these findings can be linked to the rejection-identification dynamic. This social psychological model shows that individuals who experienced discrimination are able to buffer negative consequences to their psychological well-being by identifying with the group that is discriminated against. This article adds to this earlier research by showing the crucial role of language, in particular of storytelling and small talk, in this rejection-identification dynamic.

National stereotypes are inherently evaluative, often negatively, and potentially prejudicial. While research has examined stereotypes from an organisational perspective, this is overwhelmingly in experimental settings involving students (Landy, 2008); in other words not in workplaces, and not involving employees doing their jobs. Through a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of 53 authentic business meetings, this study finds that among certain communities, national stereotypes are used in workplace narratives, and argues that such narratives constitute a contextual, situated social practice. The novel methodology pinpoints and categorises all stereotypes in business-meeting narratives, before discussing what role they play in indexing the identities of the stereotyped and the stereotyping. Finally, evaluation, ideology and power are critically engaged with to explain their use or non-use, thus making a theoretical contribution to studies of evaluation, workplace narratives, and stereotyping in discourse. While ethically problematic, and potentially detrimental to business success, their use may be motivated by local workplace goals.